Reuters reports Akron-based A. Schulman has dropped its bid for Mayfield Heights-based Ferro, about four months after it had offered $563 million for its smaller rival.

"We have given Ferro's board ample time to come back to us to initiate a discussion," A. Schulman CEO Joe Gingo said on a conference call with analysts on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

"At this time, this has not happened, so we have decided to look elsewhere for acquisition opportunities," Mr. Gingo said.

A. Schulman first contacted Ferro last November and expressed its interest in Ferro in a letter on Feb. 13, but was rebuffed. A formal offer in March also was rejected, Reuters noted.

It still pay to be in television

Unlike its weak sibling in the media industry — that would be newspapers — the television business remains highly lucrative.

Bloomberg reports that Oak Hill Capital Partners, the private equity firm backed by Texas financier Robert M. Bass, “will reap more than a 240% gain selling Local TV Holdings LLC to Tribune Co. for $2.73 billion,” citing a “person familiar with the matter.”

Chicago-based Tribune is buying all 19 television stations, including Cleveland's Fox affiliate WJW-TV, Channel 8, owned by Local TV. The all-cash purchase would be the biggest U.S. broadcasting deal in six years, Bloomberg says.

New York-based Oak Hill owns about 95% of the Local TV holdings, Bloomberg reports, citing the unidentified source. Including about $530 million it already has made in dividends, Oak Hill “will garner more than $1.7 billion, or 3.4 times the firm's $493 million equity investment,” according to the story.

“Oak Hill did a very good job working with management to improve margins by cutting back expenses, and doing better than their peers in core revenues,” Carl Salas, a senior analyst at credit rater Moody's Investors Service, tells Bloomberg. “They outperformed the industry.”

Local TV has expanded its advertising base by “going directly to advertisers and bypassing the usual agencies to place ads,” Mr. Salas tells the news service.

The company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization “is about $250 million a year based on an average of last year's results and this year's estimate,” according to Mr. Salas. That “represents a profit margin that has risen to about 40 percent from 33 percent in 2009,” Bloomberg reports.

Head's up

There are a few Cleveland connections in this QZ.com story about the possibility that we could soon see a human-to-human head transplant.

“Technical barriers to grafting one person's head onto another person's body can now be overcome,” Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, tells the website.

In a recent paper, Dr. Canavero outlines a procedure modeled on successful head transplants which have been carried out in animals since 1970. The procedure he examines “is very much like that used” by the late Dr. Robert White, formerly of MetroHealth Medical Center, who successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey onto the body of a second rhesus in 1970.

QZ.com notes that connection of a spinal cord from the head of one creature to the body of another “has never been attempted even in animals, so Dr. Canavero's paper must be taken as an exercise in speculation.”

However, the story notes, “the severing and re-connection of spinal cords in the same animal has met with limited success in the past. Just this week, scientists at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic were able to restore limited connectivity between the two severed halves of spinal cords in rats.”

New empty-nest couples “might be in for a surprise,” The Journal says. “In the sudden quiet may come to discovery that years on a treadmill — raising children, building careers — have left them very different people than they were in the their 20s or 30s. In short: They've woken up with a stranger.”

There are signs of this empty-nest syndrome in statistics that track divorce rates, according to a March 2012 white paper, "The Gray Divorce Revolution," by Bowling Green researchers.

“In 1990, fewer than 1 in 10 individuals who divorced were 50 or older,” The Journal reports. “Almost 20 years later, that number jumped to more than 1 in 4. In 2009, more than 600,000 people ages 50 and over got divorced.” (The researchers analyzed data from the 1990 U.S. Vital Statistics Report and the 2009 American Community Survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau.)

Many couples miss warning signs that something is wrong, The Journal says.

"People think that when spouses grow apart, it's because there is some big conflict or major divide," Eli Karam, assistant professor at the University of Louisville's Marriage and Family Therapy program, tells the newspaper. "That's not necessarily true."

Readers are solely responsible for the content of the comments they post here. Comments are subject to the site's terms and conditions of use and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or approval of Crain's Cleveland Business. Readers whose comments violate the terms of use may have their comments removed or all of their content blocked from viewing by other users without notification. Comments may be used in the print edition at editorial discretion.